Artificial Intelligence Post Number 4

Vicarious FPC

While warning of Artificial Intelligence dangers, Elon Musk of Tesla, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Ashton Kutcher (portrayed Steve Jobs in the movie) made a $40 million investment in Vicarious FPC, a secretive artificial-intelligence company. Vicarious’ goal is to replicate the thinking done in the neocortex, the part of the brain that mainly processes the human’s visual inputs and the thinking/actions that evolve from these inputs.

Of the 20 technical people the company lists on their web site, 14 have PhD’s. 11 have backgrounds in image recognition or related graphical interpretation. This is consistent with their emphasis that the thinking that we do related to visual input is defined by our ability to generate patterns with very little input data and extrapolate that into processing that both tests those patterns against reality and also enables “thinking” conclusions based on those graphical representations.

One of the traditional tests to determine if a computer is truly “thinking” is a Turing test, which tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to a human. Way back in October, 2013, Vicarious claims to have passed this test. Vicarious co-founder D. Scott Phoenix: “this is the first time this distinctively human act of perception has been achieved, and it uses relatively minuscule amounts of data and computing power. The Vicarious algorithms achieve a level of effectiveness and efficiency much closer to actual human brains.”

I am posting this as an indication of what progress companies are making on the road to AI. Or, at least the progress they are advertising. In this case they were able to convince Musk, Zuckerberg, Kutcher, and other investors.